Replacing Tom
by Courtney Kathrys
Summary: Ginny confesses her sins to the fire, and Sirius offers redemption. One-Shot. GW-SB


Name: Courtney Kathrys  
  
Title: Replacing Tom  
  
E-mail: Faeriedeath@hotmail.com  
  
Summery: Ginny confesses her sins to the fire, and Sirius offers redemption.  
  
Notes: Don't ask... I have no idea where I came up with this. It takes place during the summer before Ginny's seventh year. If you're a stickler for detail, you think of a way Sirius came back.... that's not the center of this story.  
  
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters are by JK Rowling. I only own the plot.  
  
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Sirius paced the house, restless and abandoned. He was forced into playing housewife once again. It wasn't as if he didn't understand their concerns, he had given them all quite a scare when he fell through the veil; but if he could fight his way back from that, what couldn't he do? But he was sworn into hiding, no one outside of Grimmauld Place could know of his return.  
  
And so he paced. Irritated, and alone. And that is when he saw her. The youngest Weasley, sitting in the library. Irritated, and alone. So he sat beside her, and gave her a taut grin, one which she returned.  
  
"This isn't fair, Mr. Black."  
  
"Why is that, Miss Weasley?"  
  
"Because everyone is out there, fighting and defending and making this world safe... and here we are. Two well bodied and perfectly able and legal wizards shut up in a house, doing nothing, for our own good. What about the good of all?"  
  
Sirius silently agreed with her statement, but not for her. He could understand Molly wanting to keep her youngest, her baby, safe from the battle. He wanted her to remain innocent to evil and war.  
  
"Ginny, you shouldn't be out there."  
  
She whipped her head around and glared at the older man, and Sirius was off put by the anger and intensity in her eyes. "I have as much a right as anyone. Maybe even more."  
  
"What do you know about evil, Ginny? You're just a –"  
  
"Child?"  
  
She laughed, low and bitter, a sound jaded and cynical. "By looks, maybe. By status, sure. But by experience? I haven't been a child for a long time."  
  
Sirius was confused by her comment, by the shadow behind her eyes. She turned them on him again, and the fire was reflected in their cinnamon color.  
  
"Tell me, Mister Black, have you ever met Voldemort? Face to face? Have you talked to him and laughed with him, confided in him? Have you ever loved him?"  
  
He paused for a moment, pondering the confusing question. He nodded, slowly. "I met him, yes, and even conversed with him. It is that moment which caused me to turn against my family. But we never laughed, or confided, or loved."  
  
Ginny gave another cynical smile, this time turning her spice eyes to the fire.  
  
"We did. I knew Voldemort as Tom. I knew him as Tom Marvolo Riddle, Head Boy, Slytherin, and my own personal diary. I can't believe Harry or Ron never told you... but no. No one likes to talk about that. It's a moment every one seems to have forgotten. Except for me, that is. I can never forget. He was Tom, and Voldemort, and Marvolo all rolled into one. He was wisdom, and passion and reason. And in my first year at Hogwarts, at the age of eleven, I fell in love with the Dark Lord through the pages of a diary. I didn't realize that he was slowly possessing me, forcing me to open his Chamber of Secrets. Using me to petrify Hermione, and Penny, and Colin, and Justin, and Nearly Headless Nick, and even that blasted Mrs. Norris. It was I who caused Hagrid to be sent to Azkaban. In the end I could refuse him nothing, he was so much a part of me by then. And he took me completely, heart, mind, and even body – in all the ways you are imagining. But Harry stopped him just short of taking my soul.  
  
"I think that's when I stopped loving Harry. I could never forgive him for saving me, and putting me in that constant limbo of not knowing if I was Tom or myself. For years I'd wake up screaming with the memories of his hands on me. Mum thought they were screams of terror. But they never were. So I dated Michael, and Dean, and even Draco; trying to purge him from me, from my mind and my body. I never could.  
  
"So you see, Mister Black? Out of anyone, maybe even more so than Harry, I have a right to hate him. Because while he took his parents, he was left with his life. I don't even have one anymore. I deserve to fight because I know every weakness of his, every pleasure, every pain, every fear. He was me, yes, but I was also him."  
  
Sirius stayed silent throughout her confession, and he had the feeling that she wasn't talking to him, but to some invisible priest to whom she was confessing her sins. Her eyes stayed locked on to the fire and his on her. He had not known of the Diary. The Chamber had been mentioned briefly, but her name had been conspicuously left out. She no longer resembled innocence and the Weasley baby. The girl had transformed into something else. She wasn't a woman quite yet, despite her curves and jaded eyes. But she wasn't a child, even if she bit her nails in nervousness and threw snits when she didn't get her way. She defied both definitions and simply was a girl, forced into adulthood way to soon. In experience, she was as old as he.  
  
Feeling his eyes on her, she turned to face him again, and he was surprised to see tears glistening there. Compulsively, he leaned in to wipe them away, and was surprised when she grabbed his wrist, holding his hand to her cheek. They locked eyes as her fingers traced his face lightly.  
  
"I don't want to belong to him anymore, Sirius."  
  
Sirius would never recall how it had happened, but in the next instant she was on top of him and his hands were tangled in her hair. At some point between clothes he recalled whispering that she was still in school, only seventeen. Somewhere in the fog of traveling hands and possessive lips he recalled her saying that it didn't matter, she was so much older than seventeen.  
  
He couldn't place the moment when he entered her, and if she hadn't raked her nails viciously down his back he would swear it had all been in his mind. He vaguely recalled her panting his name and that struck him as remarkable. Despite all her fear of Tom, his hold he had over her, she wasn't thinking of him in that moment. And in her desire driven state the name falling from her lips was his.  
  
Neither lasted very long. When he opened his eyes she had already gathered her clothes and left. It took him a while to figure out why he felt so cold. The reason he came up with, his lack of clothing, wasn't enough to convince him. But Sirius was very adept at denial.  
  
The next morning at breakfast Ginny was calm, collected. There was no recollection flashing in her eyes, and Sirius tried to think of how he could have torn his back up himself.  
  
But then Bill began to detail the mission for the day, and he looked apologetically at Ginny. "And before you ask, Ginny, you can't come."  
  
Ginny just smiled, and sipped her Pumpkin juice. "That's alright, I quite like staying here."  
  
Sirius could feel his pants tighten as she excused herself and exited the room. And when the household left, he found her in the library, her clothes already shed.  
  
"You've replaced him. It's now you who've possessed me."  
  
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End file.
